The Director of Nobody Speak on How Hulk Hogan (and Peter Thiel) Took Down Gawker

Last May Forbes broke the news that billionaire Silicon Valley investor Peter Thiel had surreptitiously bankrolled Hulk Hogan’s winning lawsuit against Gawker, the site that in 2012 published a snippet of a leaked sex tape depicting the wrestler (né Terry Bollea) in flagrante delicto with Heather Clem, then the wife of his best friend, radio shock jockey Bubba the Love Sponge (who, for the record, and to make things even more complicated, seems to have endorsed the affair). Thiel, a cofounder of PayPal, early investor in Facebook, and the guy who long hoped to build an offshore Valhalla for libertarians, funded the litigation as part of a concerted effort to punish Gawker, which had both publicly outed him as gay and gleefully reported on the travails of his now-defunct hedge fund, Clarium Capital. By the time he filed his case in a Pinellas County, Florida, civil court, Hogan had already hit roadblocks in federal court, and victory seemed like a long shot. But with the hometown advantage and an unusually sympathetic judge—and in light of a major blunder from Gawker editor in chief A.J. Daulerio, who, in a deposition, sarcastically joked that the only celebrity sex tape he wouldn’t consider newsworthy would be one featuring a preschooler—the wrestler prevailed. A jury, swayed by Team Hogan’s argument that the media ought to distinguish between Hulk Hogan the public figure and Terry Bollea the private citizen, awarded the plaintiff $140 million in damages. The verdict drove Gawker media into immediate bankruptcy. Its founder Nick Denton sold his company off to Univision, which quickly shuttered the embattled flagship site (it continues to run sister sites like Jezebel and Gizmodo). Hogan emerged victorious, but not unscathed; before the trial, the transcript of a second sex tape leaked, revealing the wrestler’s repeated use of some very ugly racial slurs. WWE, where Hogan had been a star for decades, quickly cut ties.

“It’s less about revenge and more about specific deterrence,” Thiel told The New York Times shortly after Forbes unmasked him. “I saw Gawker pioneer a unique and incredibly damaging way of getting attention by bullying people even when there was no connection with the public interest.” You may or may not agree with Thiel about whether Hulk Hogan’s sexual escapades, a topic he frequently boasted about in character, are a matter of public concern (though it’s easier to justify why his racist rant may be). You may or may not have any love for Gawker: The site, which originated a particular brand of contemptuous, deadpan snark that we now think of simply as Internet-y, seems to elicit only the strongest of feelings. But regardless, it’s clear that Thiel’s deep-pocketed pursuit of his vendetta has lasting and quite troubling implications. By funding Hogan, he succeeded not only in forever silencing a once-influential media brand, but also in landing an injurious blow to the protections enshrined in the First Amendment. At least in theory, Bollea v. Gawker sets a new precedent in how we determine what counts as newsworthy, and how courts weigh the right to privacy against the constitutionally protected right to free speech. This, under certain circumstances, is apparently the kind of influence a billionaire can buy.

In June, Forbes published another, far more whimsical piece, with casting suggestions for the inevitable movie adaptation of the saga (Matthew Fox as Denton; Nick Offerman as Hogan; Sean Hayes as Thiel). A year later the first major film to consider the case has arrived, and it’s not a Hollywood blockbuster, but a documentary that’s no less of a thrill ride: Brian Knappenberger’s Nobody Speak: Trials of the Free Press, premiering Friday, June 23, on Netflix.

Knappenberger is best known for 2014’s The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz, about the open-source activist and hacker who hanged himself at 26, a couple years after his arrest for downloading millions of articles from the subscription-based online academic library JSTOR. It’s easy to see a link between Swartz, who wrote in a 2008 manifesto that “We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world,” and Gawker, which, per Denton, in his goodbye letter to readers, “subscribed to the Internet’s most radical ideology, that information wants to be free, and that the truth shall set us free.”

“Certainly Aaron Swartz believed that all information wants to be free,” Knappenberger told me by phone. “And in that deeper idea that the Internet would provide a better educated public, would help to cure diseases, help with political revolutions. That was an ideology of the early Internet,” he goes on. “What we’ve seen in the last four or five years is a very dark side that a lot of us didn’t see coming. Some of the same technologies that helped create revolutions were also used to spy on those revolutionaries. We’re seeing an Internet that is so coursing with misinformation that it’s hard to argue that we’re better educated than we were before. We are in a kind of information war. This is the new public square and we’re sorting out what that means.”

Nobody Speak opens with scenes from a Trump rally, in which rowdy supporters jostle reporters amid cries of “Fuck the media!” The message is clear: It would be willfully blinkered to dismiss the demise of Gawker as a one-off, as just rewards for an outlet that garnered as much hate as it spewed. (In one archival clip, the late New York Times media critic David Carr referred to the site’s writers as “the mean girls; they’ll say unspeakable things.”) Knappenberger situates the Gawker case as one skirmish in a multi-front attack on the press, and on “the very notion of truth,” as one interviewee puts it. The filmmaker speaks to Denton, Daulerio, and Hogan’s personal attorney David Houston (not to be confused with Charles Harder, the bigwig Hollywood entertainment lawyer that Thiel paid to take the case), as well as a plethora of talking-head experts. He also deep dives into a second case study of how a massively wealthy individual can wield undue influence over the flow of information: Billionaire casino impresario Sheldon Adelson’s 2015 purchase of the Las Vegas Review-Journal, a deal that was shrouded in secrecy, and the dogged work of the paper’s reporters to expose the identity of their new boss.

If there’s any doubt about which side Knappenberger is on (and there’s not really), this quote from Thomas Jefferson, appended to the end of the film, makes it rather clear: “Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost.” The filmmaker and I talked more about what Gawker’s demise portends, and why its commitment to adversarial journalism is just what we need right now.

This film is a love letter to the free press. You’re a documentarian. What can you do that with documentaries that journalists can’t?When documentaries are working best, they’re independent. I think the film is a love letter to the free press, but there’s also legitimate criticisms of media: That it has, over time, become more cozy with power. I think documentaries can serve a really critical function of being a little more adversarial; telling stories that may not be the sort bigger corporatized press would normally cover. Right now I think they form a pretty critical part of the landscape.

In the months since Gawker died, I’ve had several conversations about this trial in which people have dismissed Gawker as not really worth saving. Why is that rhetoric so dangerous?There’s the old line: If you don’t believe in freedom of speech for speech you don’t like, you don’t believe in it at all. We’ve long protected ugly speech in this country, including hate speech. That’s a good thing, even if it’s uncomfortable to people at times.

Peter Thiel called Gawker a “singularly sociopathic bully,” and that’s just an absurd statement if you think about what we’ve seen in the last year alone: Alex Jones, who asserts that the murders at Sandy Hook were a false flag; Sean Hannity saying Seth Rich was the leaker of the DNC emails, despite the fact that that was debunked and his family said no way.

Look, Gawker might have done things that were uncomfortable, that people didn’t like. People mostly reacted to its tone. It was snarky, it was irreverent, and it was annoying. Most of the people who really hated it also read it every day. There are some Gawker stories that were in bad taste, but show me one that’s not true?

I didn’t pick this Gawker vs. Hogan case because it was simple and clean. I picked it because it was difficult and on the edges of free speech. That’s where the most interesting stuff is. But again, if you don’t believe in freedom for speech you don’t like, then you don’t believe in it at all. And what’s to stop Peter Thiel or someone using his tactics to go after any news organization? There’s nothing unique to Gawker about this.

If Peter Thiel saw Gawker as a singular bully, I think those on the side of Gawker saw him as one, too. And it strikes me that the divide between those two perspectives is sort of the unbridgeable no-man’s land in politics right now.It’s where we live now. I totally agree. And remember: This Hulk Hogan case was not the only effort on the part of Peter Thiel to kill Gawker. Forbes did a really great job linking him to several other cases. And Charles Harder, the attorney that Peter Thiel worked with on this, has gone after Gawker on several other fronts, too. And also, by the way, he is going after another site called Techdirt, which is critical of Silicon Valley. It’s worth remembering that the other thing Peter Thiel said is that Gawker, Valleywag, and Gizmodo were bad for the valley. And that’s probably what this was about: That they were doing journalism that was at times critical. That’s the point of journalism: to question power. Who has more power in society than Silicon Valley?

Someone in the opening scene of the film calls this case “one of the most important First Amendment cases in American history.” How has this precedent had an impact in the months since the trial?In terms of the specific use of litigation to go after a news organization, there’s still an ongoing case about Techdirt. This is actually one of the cases that was settled during the Hogan trial, a case of this guy, Shiva Ayyadurai, who claimed to have invented email. Gizmodo wrote a story saying he didn’t. Techdirt also wrote a piece about this, and Shiva and Charles Harder are going against Techdirt right now with a $15 million lawsuit.

With the bigger picture, I’ve always thought there are direct parallels between what was going on [with Gawker] and Trump’s rise. There’s a wave of hostility toward the press being fueled by Donald Trump, and it’s getting really ugly and disturbing. It’s not just his own personal attacks, calling The New York Times fake news, or all the awful things we saw from him on the campaign trail. But if you think about what we’ve seen just in the last month or two: Dan Heyman was the West Virginian reporter who was arrested for asking a question of the Health and Human Services director Tom Price. John Donnelly was pinned against the wall of the FCC when he tried to ask a question of the commissioner there. Just last week the Kentucky newspaper the Lexington Herald-Leader had its windows shot out. Gianforte [in Montana]—that was an astonishing act of violence against a reporter doing exactly what he should be doing. You take all of this together and Trump’s created a climate that’s really kind of an assault on the press. It’s unacceptable. We need to push back.

Former Gawker editor John Cook at some point says, as a journalist, “if you’re not pissing off a billionaire, there’s not much point.” Do you agree with him? And were you worried about pissing off, say, Peter Thiel?You don’t operate in this world without understanding that there could be a kind of blow back. I just spoke at Berkeley, at the symposium Lowell Bergman holds there. Bergman told me that the last thing they do in his journalism class is they have somebody sue a student. They actually bring him to trial. They teach this. So yeah, it’s part of the landscape. But you know: I do agree with Cook. We’re in a place where the press, investigative journalism, is more vulnerable than it’s ever been. This is really important in smaller communities that used to have multiple competing local newspapers that would do all the things newspapers were supposed to do: cover city council meetings and elections and events, stuff that was important to those communities. But a lot of those papers have disappeared. And without them, the world gets harder to understand, and the powerful get away with more. It’s kind of like that Tom Stoppard line: “People do terrible things to each other, but it’s worse in the places where everybody is kept in the dark.” I think a critical, healthy, rambunctious, sometimes annoying press is just critical to a democracy. And so yeah, that is ultimately the point: going after the powerful, going after the rich. In this age of inequality, that means pissing off billionaires.

Your film diverts from the Gawker story to focus on another case: billionaire Sheldon Adelson’s secret purchase of the Las Vegas Review-Journal, a paper with a long history of holding his feet to the fire. How do you see someone like Adelson as different from someone like Rupert Murdoch? Rich people have always owned newspapers . . .Yeah, rich people have always owned newspapers. You have the Hearsts, the Chandlers, the Sulzbergers. You have a modern version with Jeff Bezos. But what’s different with Adelson, and this to some degree applies to Thiel as well, is that they were operating completely in secret. When Adelson buys the Las Vegas Review-Journal, nobody knows it’s him. They don’t know what his expectations are, what his perspective is going to be, how much he wants to meddle with the paper, how much his own views are going to be reflected. They don’t know why he’s buying it, because they don’t know who it is. Most of the time when you have rich people owning papers it’s born of civic duty. You can at least understand where they’re coming from. That’s what’s dangerous about what Adelson did. In some ways it’s the same with Peter Thiel. Litigation financing happens in our society. A good counterpoint is that the ACLU often funds cases, often to make a political point. But with the ACLU everything is transparent. And that’s not the case with Peter Thiel.

There’s this other bizarre, creepy turn to this case: A.J. Daulerio’s really ill-advised sarcastic remarks during deposition that ended up being an important factor in how Gawker lost in the court of public opinion. What Daulerio said reminded me of the comments that eventually brought Milo Yiannopoulos down. Do you make anything of that connection?Yeah, wow that’s interesting. I think certainly you’re right that that joke which was just completely idiotic; it did turn the table, both in the court of public opinion, and I think it did lose the case for them. But you know the rise of Milo is interesting in that he seems to be walking this line. His case is that awful scurrilous progressives are actually policing speech too much, and are actually the ones who are restricting speech, not the conservatives. So that’s the territory of Milo, protection of the worst speech, real, true hate speech, and he rose because of that, because he was saying things that were awful, that were misogynistic, that were racist, and in the alt-right here was an audience for that.

The degree to which people abhorred not just what Milo said, but the way he said it: There’s something reminiscent there about how some sliver of people felt—rightly or wrongly—about Gawker.I think that’s true, except that Gawker was doing it in a kind of artful way, skewering a very specific part of the New York media business. They’re mostly punching up, going after power, which is much more valiant than going after historically oppressed groups. Milo is doing something radically different. He found an audience for that kind of hate speech in the alt-right in these bizarre last couple of years. That audience didn’t understand his free speech point. They just liked hearing that stuff. When he crossed the line into saying something they didn’t like, then he was dropped from the scene immediately. It was always a thin ideological stance. People just liked hearing him say racist, misogynistic things. But I have to say, I’m uncomfortable when someone like Milo is kicked off of Twitter. I hate that guy. I hate the alt-right. But I do think we have to be careful when we start drawing lines about where speech is appropriate.

There’s been a lot of hand-wringing about how Trump could limit media access to the White House. Gawker made its name by spurning the value access. Do we need Gawker now more than ever?I can’t tell you how many people I’ve talked to who have said, “We miss Gawker now more than ever.” I think that perspective that you just outlined, that access journalism can be problematic, is really important. For too long news organizations have essentially traded positive stories for access to power and celebrity, and that’s something very different than journalism. Essentially that’s PR. Journalism is what powerful people don’t want you to hear. Everything else is kind of propaganda.

So I think it certainly says something that Trump is making all these noises about [things like] maybe we’ll shut down the press conferences, maybe we’ll move them out of the White House; there’s going to be less seats. It’s problematic that Trump is treating the press this way; there’s no question. But really good journalism is adversarial journalism. It’s about doing the research and digging in.